
I know how to make and sell software online, and I can share my tips
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Pitching to VCs #2 (comic)
Posted 15 years ago
UMA and free long distance
What's to stop me from travelling to another continent, and then making free long distance calls to local numbers back home? Technically, nothing.
Yes, You Absolutely Might Possibly Need an EIN to Sell Software to the US

After many months, your software sale is complete! You've got a purchase order, sent the invoice, delivered the software. You're already handling some support issues from users at BigCorp. Then BANG! Martha from Procurement emails back, as a favour, just to let you know that BigCorp has not received your W8 form with a valid tax id, and therefore will be withholding 30% of the purchase price of your multi-thousand dollar product for taxes.
Zero load time file formats
When your app needs to be fast, you can't afford to load things fro disk. In this toy example, an on-disk data structure helps you instantly look up lists of related words.
Cell Phone Secrets
How to choose a cell phone in 2006, if you want the best possible radio.
What does your phone number spell?
Here, I explain a technique for figuring out which words are in which phone numbers. Full C source code is included.
Finding the top K items in a list efficiently
Do you use sort() to find the top results? Here's a simple trick that will make your software run much faster.
Why you should go to the Business of Software Conference Next Year

Most people, having already paid $2000.00 of their hard earned money, and then having flown, driven, or otherwise travelled to Boston to attend a conference, and then having paid an additional $250/night plus $33/night parking and "tourism taxes" to the Seaport Hotel -- most people, after all this, are unlikely to say that it was a waste of time and they should have stayed home watching the remaining salvaged episodes of
Doctor Who on Netflix.
In fact, I found it quite useful.
Why don't web browsers do this?

Why don't web pages start as fast as this computer from 1984?
O(n) Delta Compression With a Suffix Array
The difference between two sequences A and B can be compactly stored using COPY/INSERT operations. The greedy algorithm for finding these operations relies on an efficient way of finding the longest matching part of A of any given position in B. This article describes how to use a suffix array to find the optimal sequence of operations in time proportional to the length of the input sequences. As a preprocessing step, we find and store the longest match in A for every position in B in two passes over the suffix array.